Newbie Unable to Install files in AIX 5.3

I'm very new to the AIX 5.3 world. I'm really a winodws admin who got stuck with admining our AIX 5.3 server since we are a small company. Anyway our vendor sent me a CD that has a bunch of tar files on it. I was told by the vendor to mount the cd to the followig location:
/mnt/cdrom which I did and can view the cd I was then told to running the following command
'smitty install_all' and select the install location as the CD-Rom when I kick off the install thoug it states the /mnt/cdrom is not a vaild device or files...

Who is Participating?

inutoc meansinstallation utilities table of contents
It examines the filesets it finds in the given directory and creates a table of contents (you guessed that, right?) to be used by the installation utilities, among other things to give you a list when you press F4.
There are no stupid questions!

Hi again compdigit44,
this one is easy -
you don't need to mount the cdrom. The installp process will do it for you.
So, please umount the /mnt/cdrom (after having left that directory) and run smity install_all.
When asked for the INPUT device, press <F4> and select the /dev/cd0 device. That's all.
installp will mount the device when needed, and will umount it when finished.
Should you still get the error above, then there are no installable filesets on that CD in the location where installp searches for them.
We then will have to examine the CD contents. Perhaps the directory structure is not conform to smitty/installp rules..
But we'll find a solution, should there be any installable things at all.

I just tried to unmount the cdrom and run the 'smitty install_all' command again.. Now I'm getting the error in the attached screen shot? How can I tell if this CD is in a smitty install format??smitty-error.bmp

I just re-read your question. I overlooked that you were talking about 'tar' files there.
Now I really can'tunderstand why your vendor told you to use smitty to install directly from CD.
AIX smitty (which calls the 'geninstall' command, among others), is not, never was, and probably never will be able to read tar files.
If there are really tar files on the CD (please examine it one more time!), you will have to extract the CD contents to /usr/sys/inst.images (you remember?), issue 'inutoc /usr/sys/inst.images' and then repeat smitty install_all choosing that directory as 'INPUT ...'
I can give step by step instructions if you wish. Just tell me.

These are quite different things.
1)
smitty install works on AIX installation packages. They are in a format unique to AIX, sometimes called the bff format. smitty takes the data, puts them in the right places, often runs customization/initialization scripts contained in the packages, and often makes entries in the appropriate system tables and/or the odm database (something like Windows registry, well, a bit).
You can see smitty install analoguous to a windows setup.exe, or perhaps InstallShield.
The data smit install needs can be tar'ed together or not, that's marginal. Of course they need to be extracted first, as smitty install doesn't understand tar.
2)
tar files can contain packages, as I said above, but they can also contain ready-to-run binaries, config files and the like. You have to extract these and put them in the right places by yourself, or perhaps the archive contains full paths, so tar will distribute the contents accordingly. This has nothing to do with installation, it's a simple data movement.
Conclusion - if you get AIX installation packages, you must use smitty install, if you get pure binaries/text files, you can't use smitty install. tar'ed or not makes no real diffrerence.

Thanks for all of your help..
I managed to get everything installed. But now when I type in ls -l or any command it states "There isn't enough free space to compele the operation" yet there is free space and the command compele anyway ??

Please post the complete output of a 'df -k'
I guess that /usr is full. Try to empty /usr/sys/inst.images. If everything is installed you don't need it anymore, and at last you have a CD ...
Or is your new software sooo big that it fills up your filesystems?